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Prolonged Depression in Young Adulthood May Hurt Cognition in Middle Age
Prolonged depressive symptoms beginning in young adulthood are associated with worse cognitive function in midlife, especially in Black adults. Researchers published their findings in Neurology.
“Our results suggest that Black adults are not only more likely to experience worse depressive symptoms trajectories, but these symptoms may lead to worse repercussions on thinking and memory as early as middle age,” said study author Leslie Grasset, PhD, of the University of Bordeaux in France. “This may help explain some of the disparities in dementia risk at older age.”
The study included 3117 people who were an average 30 years of age at the study’s start. Among them, 47% were Black and 53% where white.
Every 5 years over 20 years, participants completed questionnaires about their depressive symptoms. Afterward, they were grouped according to depressive symptom trajectory over time: persistently low, medium decreasing, persistently medium, or high increasing.
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Black participants made up 52% of the persistently medium depressive symptoms group and 70% of the high increasing depressive symptoms group, the study found.
Five years later, when participants were an average 55 years, their cognitive function was gauged via a trio of tests. On a test of processing speed and memory in which lower scores signaled worse cognition, average scores out of a possible 133 were 73 in the persistently low symptom group, 71 in the medium decreasing symptom group, 66 in the persistently medium symptom group, and 57 in the high increasing symptom group, according to the study.
Black participants in the high symptom group had an average score that was 0.64 standard deviations below the average in the low symptom group after adjustment for factors including age, physical activity, and total cholesterol, the study found. White participants in the high symptom group had an average score that was 0.40 standard deviations below the average for the low symptom group.
Black participants in the 3 groups with high and medium symptoms had worse verbal memory, processing speed, and executive function scores across the three tests compared with Black participants in the low group, the research team reported. White participants in the high symptom group had worse verbal memory and processing speed scores compared with white participants in the low symptom group.
“Having more depressive symptoms may be due to inequalities in socioeconomic resources such as housing and income, as well as access to health care and treatment,” Dr Grasset said. “Racial inequalities should be accounted for when designing interventions to reduce a person’s risk of dementia.”
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